


The Scars That Show

by ChancellorGriffin



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Mutual Pining, OTP Feels, Romance, Sexual Content, Smut, Sweet/Hot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-05
Updated: 2015-05-05
Packaged: 2018-03-29 03:54:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3881266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChancellorGriffin/pseuds/ChancellorGriffin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The hostages have returned from Mount Weather.  The danger is over.  A new life can begin.  But Clarke has disappeared, leaving Bellamy adrift, and the only person who sees it is Marcus Kane, who didn't realize until he saw Abby tortured inside Mount Weather how he really feels about her.  As Bellamy pines for the missing Clarke, and Kane tries to break down the walls between himself and Abby, the two men who love the Griffin women find empathy and understanding with each other.</p><p>(NOTE: This work is set right after the events of the Season 2 finale, and contains my entirely unfounded speculations about what Clarke might be up to when we return for Season 3.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. "What's Your Excuse, Then?"

From the moment he saw Bellamy’s face as he walked through the gates of Camp Jaha, Kane knew Clarke was gone. He would have known it even if Bellamy hadn’t kept looking over his shoulder. He could see it in the boy’s eyes, full of a heavier sadness than what had been there before.

Camp Jaha was in utter chaos. Everyone was exhausted, dehydrated, traumatized. Everyone needed medical care of some kind or other. Later, there would be time to send teams back to Mount Weather to raid the place of as much food and medicine and clothing as they could carry, but for now there were a handful of rickety beds and the last few crates of Ark supplies, and the entire camp was put to work. The Mount Weather hostages were deeply battle-scarred, with untreated injuries left and right. Everyone who was even remotely able-bodied was put to work dressing cuts and scrapes, running back and forth to fetch food and water, or firing questions left and right at Octavia and Lincoln about Grounder remedies for fever and infection. And so, in the chaos of homecoming, it was very easy to overlook the fact that Clarke Griffin had not come home. If you were distracted, if you were busy, if you were grieving, if you were saving lives, if you were sprinting from one end of camp to the other with a bag of fresh bandages for Raven Reyes’ leg, it would be very easy to miss Bellamy Blake, standing alone as the maelstrom swirled around him, staring out at the forests beyond the gate, eyes dark with naked longing and grief. It was right there. Right in front of you. The contents of Bellamy’s heart were written in heavy dark letters all around him and anyone who stopped moving long enough to look would have seen it.

But nobody did, except Marcus Kane – the only one who knew what it meant.

Kane saw Abby safely to sickbay before he began to feel his own knees give out on him. Exhaustion, he thought. Maybe shock. Somebody – he didn’t know who – put an arm around him and gently guided him to a corner of the room where blankets and mats were stored, and told him to sleep. He didn’t want to leave Abby, but as he sat, he felt his whole body go loose-limbed, and he finally just stopped fighting and closed his eyes.

When he woke it was dark. Abby was sleeping, wounds neatly cleaned and bandaged. Her breathing was regular and her color was good. Kane let out a breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding, permitted himself a moment to very gently brush a fallen strand of hair from Abby’s face, then stepped outside.

The shrill chaos of homecoming had died down to a dull heaviness, the brisk movements of survival and emergency now replaced by the slow weight of realization. Mount Weather was gone. They were very probably safe from the Grounders. For the first time, there was a chance they were, perhaps, not under attack. And so the realization of what they had survived and who they had lost had begun to sink in. Everywhere, small clusters of people huddled together, voices low. Nobody laughed. Nobody celebrated. There was peace here, maybe, but no victory.

Away from the firelight, in the cool blue shadows, Bellamy sat alone, still watching the gate. Kane swiped a flask from one of the storage crates where liquor was generally stashed and sat down beside him. Neither of them spoke. Kane took a long drink from the flask, then passed it to Bellamy. They drank in companionable silence for a few moments before Bellamy finally spoke.

“Does she know?” was all he said.

“No,” said Kane. “She went straight to surgery when we got back, and she’s sleeping now. She doesn’t know.”

“I’ll tell her,” said Bellamy. “I’ll be the one. It should be me.”

“Why don’t you let me do it,” said Kane.

“No.” Bellamy’s voice was decisive. “No. This is mine. If she’s going to be angry at someone for letting her daughter go, let it be me. It should be me.” His voice broke a little and he covered it by taking another long pull from the flask. “It should be me,” he repeated quietly. “I couldn’t get her to stay. I tried. I did try.”

“I know you did.”

“But she just . . . left.”

“Yes,” said Kane. “I wondered if that might happen.”

“What do you mean?”

Kane took the flask back and drank again, feeling the harsh burn of the alcohol in his throat.

“We pay for these things all our lives,” he said. “The choices we make, to save the people we love. It costs us, every time. The lives at Tondc, at Mount Weather – the innocent people she couldn’t save – that was the price of war. The price of saving her people. Of saving _you_. And she paid it. She would do it again. But she feels the weight of it. I think when she looks around at all of us –“ he gestured around him at the rest of the camp – “she doesn’t see that she saved all our lives. She’s a hero who thinks she’s a villain. All she can see is the blood on her hands.” He put his hand on Bellamy’s shoulder. “You did everything right,” he said, answering the boy’s unspoken question. “You carried as much of the weight as you could. But in the end it’s still her burden. So you and me, all we can do is carry as much as we can.”

“You’re not just talking about Clarke, are you?” said Bellamy, turning to Kane and looking at him, really looking at him, for the first time, and seeing in his dark eyes something, perhaps, familiar.

“No,” said Kane. “I’m not.”

There was something about having come so close to death, so many times, and finding yourself tentatively approaching what might perhaps be safety for the first time that left a person unbalanced. The sudden evaporation of all that heightened, prolonged fear left Kane a little off-kilter. Or at any rate, that’s what he told himself afterwards, when he wondered why he said the thing he said next.

“This is who we are,” he said to Bellamy. “This is what it’s going to be like now. There are going to be a lot more nights like this. The worry, the pain. The way your heart twists in your chest when she’s not within your line of sight and your whole body eases when you see her again. That combination of awe and amazement at their strength, and the constant fear that something terrible will happen. The worry, and the wanting. That’s who we are now, you and me. We’re the men who love the Griffin women. They need us and we need them, but I think maybe, to get through this, we’re going to need each other, too.”

It was a long time before Bellamy spoke.

“I’m not . . .” he said, then stopped and tried again. “It isn’t . . . With me and Clarke, it’s not –“

“You’re young,” said Kane. “It’s all right that you don’t know it yet. That you haven’t said it yet. Because she will come back, Bellamy. There is no doubt of that. She absolutely will. And then you can say . . . Well, you’ll know what to say when it’s time to say it,” he said, smiling a little, and Bellamy might, just might, have smiled a little too. “You’re young,” he said again, “and there’s time.”

“Yeah?” said Bellamy, turning away from Kane to the doorway where a disheveled but undeniably alive Abby was slowly making her way towards them. “What’s your excuse, then?”

“It’s more complicated than it looks,” said Kane.

“Because of Clarke’s dad?”

“Because of an infinite number of things,” said Kane.

“She’s going to need you,” said Bellamy. “With Clarke gone. She’s going to need you to be there.” He stood up as Abby approached and helped her, very carefully to a seat beside Kane.

“How’s your leg?” he asked her.

“I’ll live,” she said. “Where is she?”

Bellamy and Kane looked at each other. Abby sighed wearily.

“I’ve asked ten different people and gotten ten different answers. ‘She went to the drop ship.’ ‘She’s sleeping.’ ‘She was just here a minute ago.’ Everyone on the supply run thought she was in sickbay and everyone in sickbay thought she was on the supply run. But it turns out that, when you start asking for details – what time of day did you see her, was she injured, who was she with – everyone realizes they haven’t actually seen my daughter since we got back to camp.” She looked sharply at Bellamy. “Except for you.”

“Tell her,” said Kane gently. And Bellamy told her everything. Not just about Clarke leaving, but everything that had happened before inside Mount Weather. All of the things there hadn’t been time to say. The broad strokes they knew. The details had been missing. He made more of his hand on Clarke’s hand, pulling the lever, than he might have if he were telling the story to somebody else, and his voice was a little defensive – as though convincing Abby that he and Clarke had decided together might wash the blood from Clarke’s hands. Even though he knew it was futile.

After he finished talking, Abby sat for a long time, face expressionless, eyes stony and cold. Then, without a word, she got up and walked away.

Kane watched her go, resting a comforting hand on Bellamy’s shoulder.

“It’s going to be all right,” said Kane, with more certainty than he felt. Bellamy let out a short, harsh, laugh.

“Really? Will it? You sure about that?”

“No,” said Kane, “not really,” and he squeezed Bellamy’s shoulder before standing up to follow Abby inside.

He found her in her quarters – a grandiose word for a small shed of scrap metal at the back of the camp with a mat and a desk in it, and some crates of extra medical supplies. But she was the Chancellor, and she was also Abigail Griffin, so she had earned a door that closed, which was more than most of the rest of them got. When he opened the door, he found her pacing back and forth like a caged wild animal, entire body tense with rage.

“He just let her go, Marcus,” she said, voice rising with panic. “He didn’t go after her. He didn’t even try. He just let her walk away without telling anyone where she was going.”

“I know,” he said gently.

“And now she’s gone, she’s out there somewhere, and it’s dark, and –“

“It’s Clarke, Abby,” he said. “Think of what she’s already survived.”

“We’re sending out a search party first thing in the morning,” she said.

“No.”

She turned to him, startled, anger dawning in her eyes.

“What do you mean, no?”

“First thing in the morning, everyone who can walk is headed back to Mount Weather to collect supplies,” he said, “and you know it. There’s food, medicine, clothing, building materials . . . not to mention we need to start thinking about what to do with everything there we can’t take with us. Or whether we should think about moving the camp there.”

She shuddered.

“We can’t live there,” she said. “Not after . . .”

“Maybe not,” he said. “But you’re the Chancellor. There are decisions to be made. And you know as well as I do that we can’t spare anyone to hunt for Clarke if Clarke doesn’t want to be found.”

Abby deflated a little at this, and sank down onto the floor. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the wall behind her. After a moment, Kane sat down beside her and took her hand.

“I’m so tired,” she said.

“I know.”

“I keep thinking it will be over, and it’s never over.”

“I know.”

“I don’t know how to do this without her,” Abby said softly. “I fought her every step of the way, I pushed her so hard, I didn’t listen when I should have . . . but the fact is that we need her. I need her. She’s been holding all of us together.   And now she’s gone.” Her voice broke. “She’s gone, and I don’t know where she is, and I didn’t get to tell her –“

Kane wrapped his arms around her and she sank into them gratefully, melting into his body and burying her face in his shoulder. They sat there like that for a long time. Abby cried and cried until it felt as though there were no tears left in the whole world, and Kane held her in firm, comforting arms, murmuring softly into her hair.

When she finally pulled away, he could see streaks of clean skin on her face where her tears had cut through the dirt and grime and blood on her face, and there was something in the thought of that, of a clean grief slicing through an uglier one, that felt important somehow and he wished he had the words for it.

I don’t know how to do this alone, Marcus,” she said, and she looked at him as she said his name, and something happened, neither of them could name it, but a current passed between them, electric, undeniable.

“You’re not alone,” he said, “not ever,” and that was when he kissed her.

There was a moment of initial shock – he had surprised himself as much as her – but only a moment. Almost instantly her mouth parted beneath his and he felt himself falling into a dark, bottomless sea, disappearing into her completely. Nothing else in the world existed except her warm mouth beneath his and the place at her collarbone where his hand brushed her soft skin. Her hands slid up his back into his dark hair, pulling him closer, holding him tightly, and it made his heart flip over in his chest. He had thought he would always be chasing her, always watching her from a distance, always one step behind, keeping her honest, keeping her safe. He had convinced himself that that was enough. That just loving her, protecting her, being her good right hand, was enough. _What’s your excuse, then?_ He heard Bellamy Blake say in his mind. And it had been as simple as Bellamy’s. Fear. That was all. Fear that if he reached out to her, she would back away. Fear that if he let himself fall, he would never stop falling. Fear that the precarious emotional bond they had cautiously built between the Ark and the ground would collapse into dust if one of them moved too suddenly. And yet here she was, in his arms, her mouth hot and urgent beneath his, responding to him, _wanting_ him, and he knew he had been lying to himself about Abigail Griffin from the moment they fell to earth.

And then, just as the electric current running between them began to accelerate, she pushed him away, hard, recoiling as though he had slapped her, and put as much space between them as she could.

“I can’t do this,” she said. “Not right now.”

“Okay,” he said nodding, and watched her for a moment to see if she would say any more. She turned to him, her lips parted, she inhaled, she was about to speak – then she shook her head and broke the spell. No. The answer was going to be no, then.

“I’m sorry,” he said, a little uncertainly, wondering if he had crossed an invisible line and triggered an alarm he didn’t know was there. She shook her head impatiently, dismissing his apology.

“I just can’t do this,” she said. “I can’t – with Clarke out there, missing, and a camp full of people depending on me, and a mountain full of dead bodies to deal with in the morning . . . I can’t do this.”

He rose then, and went to stand beside her.

“Can’t do what, Abby?” he said, in a low voice.

“Stop it. Just go. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

“You’re afraid to want anything,” he said gently, “because everything you’ve ever loved has been taken away. I understand that, Abby. I see you.” He put a hand on her shoulder – not charged with desire, not now, but comforting and solid and warm. “Listen to me, Abby. _I see you_.” She didn’t pull away from his hand, but she couldn’t meet his eyes anymore. “And I’m telling you, I’m not going anywhere. I’m not leaving you. You don’t have to be afraid.”

“I can’t give you what you want,” she said, her voice ragged and harsh, and she did pull away from him then, as though the pressure of his palm on her shoulder was too much for her.

“What – Abby, what is it that you think I want?”

“I’m not going to fuck you, Kane,” she said, in a voice made of ice. “So just go.”

He was so stunned by her words that at first he wasn’t sure he had heard her right, but when she pulled the door open for him and stood away from it, arms crossed, waiting for him to leave, he knew. She wouldn’t meet his eyes, but the chill radiating from her gave him an almost physical pain. He wasn’t sure who it was she was really angry at – was it him? Herself? Clarke? – but he knew there was nothing he could say to fix it. So he did the only thing he could do. He gave her what she wanted.

He walked out the door.

But he couldn’t help himself, and turned back to her as she started to close it behind him.

“You know me better than that,” he said. “And when did you start calling me ‘Kane’ again?”

She slammed the door in his face.

The next morning, when the Chancellor’s orders went out, and Kane found himself assigned to lead the two-week supply mission to Mount Weather, he wasn’t even a little bit surprised.

 

**TO BE CONTINUED**


	2. “Are You Being Punished For Something?”

To Bellamy’s credit, he waited until nearly the end of the second week before making his first sarcastic comment about the situation.

“No offense, but this gig seems a little beneath you,” he said to Kane as they boxed up dry goods from Mount Weather’s storage pantry into crates. It was close to the end of their second week, and there was so much to do that any Camp Jaha hierarchy had long since dissipated; everyone was just a pair of hands, taking whatever work was required. And out of respect to Monty and Miller, who were on the supply team as well, Kane had insisted that nobody who had been held hostage in Mount Weather should be forced to go back inside.  (Excluding himself, of course.  What he really meant was that the _kids_ shouldn't have to.)  So the two dozen or so others spread out all over the building to haul out whatever they could, while Monty and Miller organized the team of runners, ferrying crates back to camp.  On the Chancellor's orders, Jackson was packing up medical supplies on Level Three and Sinclair took charge of the weapons storage locker in the warehouse on Level One, leaving everyone else to pretty much just pick a room and start packing. But nobody wanted to go to Level Five - where the 48 had been held, where the residents of Mount Weather had died, where their bodies still lay when the group arrived.  Nobody wanted to go down to Level Five.  So Kane and Bellamy, who were so haunted by other ghosts that Level Five did not frighten them, ended up on kitchen duty, sorting through the storage pantries for whatever could survive at Camp Jaha without refrigeration until they could figure out some way to access the mountain’s power supply.  And though the others did not thank them out loud, they were grateful to give Level Five a wide berth.

“What could you possibly be talking about?” Kane remarked dryly, hefting a ten-pound bag of cake flour into a wheeled kitchen cart.

“I could have led this supply train myself,” said Bellamy. “She knows that.” Kane raised an eyebrow and Bellamy laughed. “No offense.”

“None taken. I think.”

“But it didn’t need both of us. And she knows I know my way around this place better. It made sense to send me. But you –“

“We all have to pitch in,” said Marcus.

“Yeah, but come on.” Bellamy gestured at the room. “Anybody able-bodied enough to walk here and haul boxes could be doing what you’re doing.”

“Yes, but I like to think I do it with some _flair_.”

“Kane,” said Bellamy. “Seriously.”

“Are you asking why, instead of being back at Camp Jaha serving as a valued advisor to the Chancellor, I’m forty miles away in neck-deep in powdered nutmeg?” asked Kane.

“Yeah, I am,” said Bellamy. “Are you being punished for something?”

Kane did not have an immediate answer ready, and busied himself by prying open a pile of wooden crates and dumping the packets of tea inside into a weatherproof metal box for transport. Bellamy gave up after awhile and went back to neatly piling bags of sugar and salt onto the cart. They worked in silence for a few minutes before Kane finally turned back to him.

“She doesn’t want me around right now,” was all he said.

“This is a strange time for you to be gone for two weeks,” said Bellamy.

“I know.”

“There’s so much to decide,” he said. “What do with this place. All this stuff. The . . .” He stopped short, but gestured loosely upward, and Kane knew what he meant. He meant the bodies. Kane nodded.

“I know.”

“You should be there. Don’t you think you should be there?”

“I do,” said Kane. “I do think I should be there. But I’m not the Chancellor. It wasn’t my decision.”

“So you _are_ being punished for something.”

“In a manner of speaking,” said Kane, “I think I might be. But the problem is that I’m not entirely sure what.”

“You don’t know what you did?”

“Oh, no,” said Kane. “I know exactly what I did. I’m just not totally clear on how it ended up with me in this room, repacking boxes of tea.”

Bellamy looked puzzled, and was about to press more when Monroe entered, looking for Kane.

“I’m here to spell you off,” she said, “Sinclair wants you in the weapons locker. I can finish down here with Bellamy.”

“Thanks,” said Kane, and left them to it. As he turned the corner, he heard her laughing.

“If anyone finds out what the ex-Chancellor did to get stuck as kitchenhand, I’m dying to know. Did he say anything to you?”

“No,” Kane heard Bellamy say, “but I think I have a guess.”

* * *

For the first few days, the supply team wandered through Mount Weather like ghosts.  The hushed silence was eerie.  None of the Ark refugees had been inside it before, and their awe at its beauty and sophistication - the alarm systems, the carpeting, the paintings on walls - was matched only by their constant, nervous collective habit of looking over their shoulder behind them.  Everyone knew what the people who lived here had done.  Everyone knew Mount Weather would have killed them all if given half a chance. 

Still.  The bodies.

The group's instinctive avoidance of the mass tomb that Level Five had become did not entirely protect them.  People had died all over the building.  Elderly people.  Children.  You might be on a routine sweep of the science lab to box up equipment and open the door to a storage room you hadn't seen before and stumble upon the radiation-scorched body of a lab tech who hadn't gotten out in time.  Kane watched and preserved a tactful silence as Jackson disappeared from time to time to find a discreet place to vomit, or others brushed past him on the way back to camp, swallowing tears.  And so his first order had been to move the bodies.  There was a cold storage room in the Level One warehouse, near the main entrance, that was large enough, once cleared, to keep the bodies of Mount Weather's dead until the Chancellor decided what to do with them.  This was the reason, despite his insistence that his expertise would prove useful in sorting through tech equipment, that Bellamy and Monty had joined forces to insist that Jasper stay behind.  Raven's leg was still healing, he had reasoned, and he should go in her place, he would know what was needed.  And so it had fallen to Kane to explain to him, as gently as he could, that until a formal decision was made he would not be permitted to bury Maya.  Wick had been sent instead.

It was a thorny question - what to do with the bodies.  It was the kind of thing Kane was used to talking over with Abby, sitting together late at night drinking tea in her quarters, or out by the fires when the weather allowed it, discussing and debating. They had come a long way since the day Kane had handed her his Chancellor pin - an even longer way since the Ark. But he was not there, counseling the Chancellor.  He was here, hauling boxes - a job that Bellamy had correctly pointed out could have been done just as well by anyone able-bodied enough to make the walk - and Abby still had not made a decision.  The first caravan had already left from the mountain, hauling carts of medical supplies back to Camp Jaha, and returned, reporting that there was still no word from the Chancellor on what to do with the bodies.  But Kane, who thought it completely impossible to ask people to work in a building littered with human corpses, grew tired of waiting, and finally decided that a respectful temporary home for them was necessary before anything else could be done.  If she wanted to be angry, fine.

Once the bodies were gone, the mood lifted considerably, and by the end of the second week the group had become remarkably acclimated to the place.  It was just another piece of Earth strangeness, another new task that needed to be taken on; and, to most of them, a satisfying one.  The dead bodies were enemies, after all, who had tortured their own people; there was a primal satisfaction to some members of the team in packing up and carting away all that food, medicine, electronics, weapons, furniture, building materials, tools, clothing – all better quality than they were used to on the Ark, let alone Camp Jaha. The dead did not need it, so it was not stealing.  Not if it meant that life would get better. That the camp would become home. This place had given them gifts. Once the bodies were out of sight, there was no need to think of them. No need to dwell on it if you rounded a corner suddenly and caught sight of a smear of blood on concrete, at just the height of a man’s head. No need to avert your eyes when you walked past the children’s drawings outside the classroom. The dead were dead. Only the living mattered. That was what they told themselves.

Not all of them, of course.  Not Bellamy Blake and Marcus Kane, who carried the weight of every lost life on their shoulders because Clarke and Abby Griffin did.

Outside the mountain, however, their makeshift camp remained somber. Not just because of Monty and Miller, and the handful of others present who had been captive with the 48, but because it was somehow easier during the day to forget. To keep hands busy and minds quiet. To make easy conversation as they hauled boxes and packed crates, picturing their new lives back at camp with magical new things like fresh fruit and real pillows. But at night, all of that went away. At night, when it was just them and the woods, nobody felt much like talking and nobody slept very well. The ghosts of Mount Weather were all around them, then.

Kane’s sleep was troubled by more than just thoughts of the dead.  Every night he lay down on his flimsy bedroll and closed his eyes, and every night he endured the same cycle of tortured thoughts. It was impossible to be here without thoughts of Abby, held prisoner beneath Mount Weather.  Abby, screaming in pain as a drill bored into the bone of her leg, while Kane sobbed and cried out, fruitlessly, voice lost in the chaos, begging them to stop. He could forget it during the day – mostly – if he kept busy enough, but it returned the second he closed his eyes. Then it would fade out, replaced by Abby’s face, hard and cold, as she threw him out of her room the night they had come back.  It was only partially a relief when these images were occasionally replaced by other thoughts – more pleasant, perhaps, but no less unsettling – of the kiss.

The kiss haunted him. It followed him through Mount Weather like a ghost. It was there when he woke up in the morning and there when he fell asleep, and even when his thoughts were occupied with work, it was never gone. It was only waiting. Waiting for the moment when Marcus Kane would close his eyes at night, so it could strike again.

The impossible softness of her lips, melting beneath his. The feel of her hands on him. The smoky, salty scent of her. In the moments as he drifted off to sleep, he would feel himself kiss her over and over, a hundred times, a thousand times, and he would take her in his arms and he would lay her down on her bed with infinite tenderness, and he would stroke her hair, and press soft kisses in her neck, and she would sigh his name . . . and then the sighs would turn into screams, and they would be back inside Mount Weather again, Abby on the table and Kane chained helplessly to the wall.

Finally, that night, Kane gave up, and decided to go for a walk instead. He left the camp quietly and headed toward the open clearing where the Grounder armies had massed behind Lexa . . . and then dispersed, without a fight, once their captured people had been returned. Kane sat on the ground, looking up at the vast door, and he thought about Clarke Griffin. He wondered where she was. He wondered what she would have to do to heal her own heart enough to return home to the people who loved her. He wondered what would happen to Abby and to Bellamy if she didn’t.

_And to him._

The thought entered his mind unbidden, but there it was. It was real and true. He cared for Clarke. She _mattered._ Not just as Abby’s daughter, not just as a child who had never been given the chance to be a child and deserved his compassion, and not just as the shrewd tactician and leader she had, seemingly overnight, become . . . but as _herself._

Nobody who had known Marcus Kane on the Ark would accuse him of being particularly warm. Thelonious had admired him for it, in fact – “wisdom unclouded by sentiment,” or words to that effect. It had been part of what made Kane valuable on the Ark. Had made him who he was. He was law and order, he was logic and reason, he was the ends justify the means.  And then he had fallen to earth, and everything had changed.

Nobody was more surprised than he was to find that he had, suddenly and unaccountably, come to love Clarke Griffin with a kind of passionate fatherly protectiveness he had never once in his life believed himself capable of. He simply was not that man.   He never had been.  He had never _wanted_ to be. But there it was, beckoning to him, the alluring fantasy he now couldn't shake.  The chance to stop just surviving and begin to build a life.  A home.

_A family._

He wondered what his mother would say. Well, no, he didn’t. He knew _exactly_ what his mother would say. 

A branch creaked and cracked behind him, and Bellamy stepped out of the woods. They were both surprised to see each other, but Bellamy more, and Kane deduced that he had happened upon a spot that Bellamy had claimed for himself on his own sleepless nights.

“I can go,” said Kane.

“No,” said Bellamy, “it’s fine.”

"I don't mind."

"No, it's okay.  Really." 

They looked at each other for a moment, then Kane gestured at the spot on the ground next to him.  Bellamy approached, and sat.  For a moment they said nothing, just looked up at the door together, both thinking about Clarke.

"I've been having trouble sleeping," said Bellamy.  "Since we came up here.  I mean, before too.  But here, it's . . . bad."  Kane nodded.  "You too?" Bellamy inquired.

"Me too," said Kane. 

"It gives me nightmares," said Bellamy.  "Well, nightmare, singular.  Just the one.  The same one, each time.  I'm back inside Mount Weather, and it's dark, and filled with smoke, with the alarms blaring and the lights all flashing red, and I'm running, but the hallways keep moving and changing direction and turning into dead ends -"

"And you can't find Clarke," Kane finished for him, and a surprised Bellamy nodded.

"Sometimes I'm chasing her, and she's running away," he said.  "And sometimes she's lost and I'm searching for her.  But I'm always running.  I can't stop running."

"Do you ever find her?" Kane asked.

“I haven’t yet,” said Bellamy. “But I will.”

Kane couldn't help himself from smiling a little at that.  There was something endearing in Bellamy’s persistence – too weary to be called optimism, maybe, but there was a flicker of hope in it somewhere nonetheless. It was nice to think that maybe one of them would get what they wanted.

“What about you?” said Bellamy, still staring up at the door in the cliff face.

“What about me, what?”

“You couldn’t sleep either.”

“No,” he said. “I couldn’t.”

“Is it nightmares, for you too?”

Kane nodded.

“I’ve done things,” he said, unable to keep a rasp of emotion from taking over his voice. “On the Ark, and here. Some of them were unspeakable. But I thought I was one of the good guys. I was so sure. I was on the side of righteousness, and order. We were trying to keep the whole human race alive. And it makes you cold, and hard, that kind of responsibility. Because at any given moment you might have to make a choice, to end somebody’s life so that others might live.” He looked over at Bellamy. “I’d imagine you know something about that yourself.” Bellamy didn’t even have to answer, of course; they both knew it was true. “And the things I’ve done,” Kane went on, “she knows. She knows all of them. And I thought – lately, I suppose, it had seemed like there was a possibility of – I don’t know. Redemption, maybe. I can feel her inside me, sometimes. I feel her making me a better person. That sounds naïve. But she does. But what I mean to say is, the worst sins of my life have been laid bare in front of Abby Griffin and there were still times that she looked at me like she didn’t hate me anymore.  Like she might, maybe, a little bit . . . care."

“So then what happened?” asked Bellamy, curiosity temporarily winning out over his cautious respect for Kane.

“What happened,” Kane said, “is that I kissed her.”

Bellamy stared at him.

“You kissed her.”

“Yes.”

“You _kissed_ her.”

"That’s what I said.”

_"Abby?”_

“No, Indra,” snapped Kane, exasperated, which startled Bellamy into a loud laugh. “Of _course_ Abby.”

“Indra’s a nice-looking woman,” Bellamy offered. “In case this doesn’t work out.”

“Indra’s _terrifying_ , and you know it. All the Grounder women I've met are.”

“Hey now. My sister’s a Grounder,” said Bellamy.

“I know,” said Kane. “I’m a little terrified of her too.” Bellamy laughed again, and after a moment, so did Kane.

“You kissed Abby,” said Bellamy again. 

“I kissed Abby,” said Kane. “And it was a disaster.”

“Oh no,” said Bellamy sympathetically. “Because it’s been so long that you forgot how to do it?” Kane’s response to this was to smack Bellamy upside the head with the flat of his hand.

“No, you cocky twenty-something smartass,” said Kane. “My proficiency was not in question."

“Well, you know, you hit a certain age, the mind starts to go a little soft –“

“ _Oh my God_ ,” exclaimed Kane, “how old do you people think I am?”

“Don’t worry,” said Bellamy reassuringly, “your face is so bruised and beat up she’ll hardly care that your beard’s coming in gray now,” which made Kane laugh harder than he had laughed in as long as he could remember.

“Good God,” he said, wiping the tears away from his eyes. “I’m old enough to be your father. I can’t believe I’m even having this conversation with you.”  Bellamy gestured expansively at the empty clearing.

“You see anyone else better around here to have this conversation with?”

“That’s a fair point,” said Kane.

“So you kissed her and it was a disaster,” said Bellamy.

“Not the kiss,” said Kane defensively. “The kiss was good.”

“I believe you,” said Bellamy, throwing up his hands in protest, “you don’t have to keep selling me on it.”

“Fine.”

“So then what?"

“I don’t know,” said Kane. “I honestly don’t.  I kissed her, and it was - well -"

"It was good," said Bellamy hastily.  "This is Clarke's mom.  I don't want the picture in my head.  You can just say it was good."

"It was very good," said Kane.  "And then everything . . . shifted.  It was _going_ somewhere. And then it was like a door slammed shut inside her.  Poof.  Just like that.  Gone.  And she said . . . well, never mind what she said, but she said something - not like her - and then more or less pushed me out the door."

"Oh," said Bellamy.  "Okay.  I get it."

"You do?" said Kane, puzzled.  "Because I don't.  I’ve been going over it and over it and I have no idea what happened."

"You know exactly what happened," said Bellamy, "if you would just put two and two together."

"It's weird enough to be talking to you about this at all, and now you're calling me an idiot," said Kane.  "I should have stayed in bed."

"You keep forgetting about Jake Griffin," Bellamy said, and it startled Kane into silence.  "This is what they do," he went on.  "This is who they are.  They live their whole lives braced for the worst-case scenario, convinced that they’re the only ones that can stop it. And they punish themselves forever if they can’t.  You're surprised that after you kiss her, and it starts to go somewhere, she shuts down?  _Kane._ The last man Abby Griffin loved _died_ because of her.  And now you've got her terrified that it's going to happen to her twice."

* * *

Kane was not the only one awake in the middle of the night and thinking about that kiss. Back at Camp Jaha, sleep was just as elusive for Abby. She had been so certain that first morning about sending Marcus away; she needed him gone, she needed him far away, she couldn’t _think_ when he was nearby, she couldn’t do her job and be the Chancellor and make decisions with the taste of his kiss still on her mouth. Although, if she was being honest with herself, the conflict inside her wasn’t just about the kiss. It had, in fact, very little to do with the kiss itself, and a great deal more to do with where they had both known the kiss was leading. The kiss was an iron key that Marcus had slipped into a lock and turned until it clicked. Now the door was unlocked, and the dark thing behind it was heaving and roiling and its murmurs were growing louder and at any minute the whole wall could come crashing down. The kiss was only the key. In itself, harmless. Nothing. Abby was not afraid of the key. She was only afraid of the things that lived on the other side of the door.

And so she had sent Marcus to lead the supply train with Bellamy, even though Marcus was entirely redundant; Jackson, Wick and Sinclair were perfectly competent to coordinate the packing and transport, while Bellamy knew every inch of Mount Weather. They didn’t need Marcus.

_She_ needed Marcus.

But right now she couldn’t look at him. So Marcus had to go.

Now that he was gone – had been gone for close to two weeks – enough time had passed since the kiss that she was wondering, after all, if perhaps she had not been perfectly right. She had no one left to confide in. Thelonious was long gone. Raven Reyes had retreated inside herself since the return from Mount Weather, and some of her spark had faded.  Abby had an enormous respect for Lincoln, but Lincoln was difficult to get to know. He gave sound counsel when consulted but he was not a friend, and anyway no one had returned from Mount Weather more shattered by it than him. She could not bring herself to consult any of the 48 – she was trying, really she was, to stop seeing them as children, but hadn’t managed it yet. And there was little mutual trust there. They had been inside Mount Weather all this time. They didn’t know her. She was Clarke’s mother ( _Don’t think about Clarke. Clarke will be safe. Clarke will come home. There is nothing you can do for Clarke right now. Don’t think about Clarke_ ) and the Chancellor, but she was not their friend. And so she found herself feeling in some ways more alone than she had ever felt in her life. Never had she needed counsel more. Every day there were new questions needing answers from the Chancellor, and she knew, as the first cartloads of supplies made their way down to camp, that the Mount Weather team was asking questions about what she wanted them to do with the bodies.

The problem was that she didn’t _know_ what to do with the bodies. The thought of digging hundreds of individual graves nauseated her beyond belief with its crushing endlessness, the idea of tossing all the bodies in a mass grave and leaving them there like refuse was devastatingly inhumane. She had considered burning, but the smoke and the smell would be horrific. She didn’t know. She had no idea what to do. She needed someone to talk to about it, someone she trusted.

_Just say it, Abby._

She needed Marcus. Marcus would listen. Marcus would know.

But Marcus wasn’t there.

He had kissed her ( _don’t lie to yourself, you kissed him back_ ) and something inside her, behind that locked door, had woken up, stirred from a long heavy sleep, and roused itself for the first time in years, and it had thrown Abby into internal chaos. Maybe on a more sane day she would have walked away, slept on it, and come back to him in the morning with a rational list of reasons why this thing, whatever it was, couldn’t happen. But her daughter was missing and they had all very nearly died and nobody had slept in weeks and every time she moved, feeling the wound in her leg sing with pain, she remembered the way he had looked at her there on the operating table in Mount Weather when they both thought she was going to die. So instead of calm sanity, she had recoiled from him like his touch was poisonous and then said something so petty and nasty that surely he would never want to kiss her again.

_"I’m not going to fuck you, Marcus, so just go.”_

And then she forced him out the door before she had to think too hard about what it meant that he stared at her after she spoke those words as though they had caused him physical pain.

But he didn’t understand. He didn’t understand that _she had to_. He didn’t understand that it was taking all the strength she had to keep that door closed. He didn’t understand that he was making everything harder.

Sleep had not come easily to Abby for any of the twelve nights since Marcus left, and on this night in particular, it eluded her entirely. She had lain in bed for three hours, just staring up at the ceiling, eyes wide open, and was not even drowsy.

She was thinking.

She was trying very, very hard not to think.

Tonight, it was the way his strong arms had cradled her while she sobbed into his chest, before the kiss happened. That was the memory that would not leave her. How safe she felt, how restful it was to stop running, just for a minute, to take off her armor and set it down and lie there, safe and protected in Marcus’ arms.

_The door creaked open. She pushed it closed with all her might._

It wasn’t, precisely, that she had never felt attracted to Marcus. There had been moments in the past, more than once, where she had felt a little ripple of something pass between them. He was a handsome man, had always been a handsome man, though she liked him better down here on the ground.  The man with the slicked-back hair and rigid posture and infuriating conviction in his own rightness, that was _Kane._ The rumpled, unshaven man with a face full of cuts and bruises and compassion in his eyes, that was _Marcus -_ whom she had grown, unaccountably, to depend on.

_Creak._

_Creak._

_Creak._

She tossed and turned in her bed, flipping over to lie on her stomach, staying there for a few moments, praying sleep would come, then giving up and rolling over onto her back again, staring up at the ceiling some more.

Maybe it would help if she went back to thinking of him as Kane.

No. Kane was the man who flogged her, who tried to have her floated on the Ark. Marcus was the one who screamed when the drill entered the bone of her leg exactly as though he was the one it was happening to. The old Kane was gone.

_The door began to open, and the twisted dark thing rustled and murmured behind it._

She had loved her husband, and she had lost him. He was dead because of her. It had been necessary – it had been the only thing to do, the only possible thing – but when Jake Griffin was floated, a piece of Abby Griffin went with him. She took a deep breath and she put her heart away, far away where it would never bother her again, and she locked the door. That part of her life was over.

When you send a piece of your soul into the black void of space the day your husband dies, you do not expect to wake up one day and find that it has come back to you.

_For God’s sake, Abby, close the door. Close the_ fucking _door._

No, Marcus was not hers for the taking.  She had let Jake Griffin die to save her people, and she was only a Council member then. Now she was Chancellor. Now all of it was on her shoulders. The threat from Mount Weather might be gone, and the Grounders might be allies of some kind, but this was still a perilous, alien world. Abby had not been on Earth long enough for anything she knew about this place to be certain. And in a place so dangerous, so full of uncertainty, it would be a terribly reckless and irresponsible Chancellor who opened the dark room where her heart was buried to let in a man who had once tried to kill her. Not after just one kiss.

One very, very good kiss.

There hadn’t been a man in Abby Griffin’s bed since she lost Jake. She had never given it a moment’s thought. She was perfectly competent at satisfying her basic needs on her own, and if, after a few years, her self-pleasure had become a bit rote and workmanlike, primarily of use to take the edge off and help her fall asleep at night, she can hardly be blamed for that. The door was closed. There were other things on her mind.

And then Marcus Kane pressed his mouth to hers, and oh, poor Abby. It was all over. She had no idea she was never going to get that door closed again.

Almost against her will, her hand slipped down between her thighs, underneath the black cotton of her underwear. She never thought when she touched herself, she didn’t fantasize, she just _did_ it. She stroked the right places with practiced skill until she came, quietly and efficiently, and then she rolled over and went to sleep. There was a routine. Consistency was comforting. But tonight, something was different. Tonight, in her mind, Marcus was there. His warm body on top of hers, his mouth trailing kisses across her breasts, and his hands – his big, callused, powerful hands – on her and inside her. She closed her eyes. She stroked herself. She could feel him. It was no longer her fingertip flicking at the hard, wet bud at her center. It was his. He would touch her all over, he would bury his mouth in her throat and his hand would find all the right places and she would be frantic, wild, back arched, she would cry out, and just as she was about to burst he would pull his hand away, and shift his body, and he would look at her without saying anything, and she would nod, _Yes,_ and whisper his name, and then with a look of fierce concentration on his face and one powerful thrust –

She came so hard against her own hand that it startled her, and she could not stifle her own soft cry. She felt a little dizzy, and breathed in deeply, and sleep finally arrived to overtake her. And she gave up, then, just for a night, she stopped fighting it, and she drifted off to sleep imagining herself wrapped tightly in Marcus Kane’s arms.

_As she slept, the door opened wider and wider._

 

**TO BE CONTINUED**


	3. "Why Can't You Give It To Her Yourself?"

Two weeks came and went and turned into three, as every few days a handful of workers would return from Mount Weather to Camp Jaha ferrying loads of supplies. Raven and Wick had repurposed a couple of metal kitchen carts that the first team had brought back, outfitting them with sturdier wheels for the rocky terrain, and the carts rumbled back and forth between the camp and the mountain, pushed by rotating teams of six or eight while the others packed. A subtle but definite unspoken set of rules had emerged among the group. Things that had belonged to Mount Weather were fair game – food, weapons, medicine, supplies. Things that had belonged to people were left where they were. Clothing was taken from the central warehouse storerooms, then, but not from bedroom closets. A teacup in the mess hall, piled next to six dozen other teacups, was theirs for the taking; a teacup sitting out on a living room coffee table, next to a book where its owner had set it down and fled to Level Five on the day of the slaughter, was decidedly not. The residential floors became living tombs, while the public areas – the labs, the kitchens, the storerooms – were slowly stripped bare.

At the end of three and a half weeks, the supply team had cleared every floor but the top one of anything deemed worth taking. What they couldn’t carry with them was left in the vast Level 1 warehouse to be collected later, but the camp had been sufficiently stocked for the next several months. Once Raven was well enough to make the trek, Bellamy had promised to take her to the underground parking garage where he and Octavia had found Lincoln, and the only force compelling the mechanic to sit still long enough to allow her leg to heal was the promise of getting to hot-wire some cars at the end of it.  Abby was pleased that, with access to transportation and the clearing of a road, they could make supply runs to Mount Weather in a fraction of the time, but she was still more pleased to see Raven's fire coming back.

It was during Raven's final weekly checkup when Abby heard the telltale rumbling of carts across stone which told her that the supply team had come home from Mount Weather.  Although her pulse sped up a little at the sound, she forced herself to remain – at least on the outside – calm and unruffled. Her fingers, prodding gently at the scar tissue where the stitches had come out, only trembled a little. Not enough to notice, unless you were looking for it; and Raven Reyes, giddy-eyed with daydreams of fan belts and alternators, was most emphatically not.

“Looks good,” Abby said. 

“Am I cleared to travel?” asked Raven.

“You’re cleared to travel,” said Abby, smiling in spite of herself at the ecstatic relief on Raven’s face. "You'll be dismantling ninety-seven-year-old pickup trucks by the end of the week."

"That's the sexiest thing you've ever said to me, Abby Griffin," said Raven with a grin, hopping down off the operating table. “Supply team’s back, I’m gonna go find Wick.  You gonna be here?  I'll send Kane along for you when I see him."

"No," said Abby, striving for nonchalance and missing by a mile.  Raven looked at her curiously.  "I’ve got a huge pile of inventory to sort,” she explained, a little weakly. “I’ll need Jackson first. Tell Kane to – tell him I’ll come find him later.” Raven raised one eyebrow but didn't pry, as she left Abby alone in Medical and limped out the door.

Jackson had dived into the storage rooms of Mount Weather's hospital wing as giddy as a kid on his birthday, and every caravan of rumbling supply carts had brought back new treasures for Abby.  Sterile gauze.  Real bandages.  Antibiotics. A crate of flawlessly maintained surgical equipment, which she could only bear to touch by attempting to convince herself that none of these tools had been used on dead children or Grounders. (She resterilized them anyway, in an effort to purge them of ghosts.)  So when she told Raven that was why she couldn’t come out to greet the returning supply team – who she could hear, through the walls, being hailed like conquering heroes by every camp resident who had heard the news that they brought back wine – it was not really a lie. The pile of boxes in front of her gave Abby plausible deniability,  in case anyone happened to walk in and catch her staring into space, straining through the babble of muffled sounds to hear pick out one particular voice.  Which was exactly what happened twenty minutes later when Jackson knocked on the door and delivered to Abby both a cart stacked with boxes marked "Medical," and the message that Marcus was not there.

* * *

Nobody born on the Ark had ever been asked who they wanted to be when they grew up, or what they wanted to do with their lives.  Everyone was just waking up in the morning and putting one foot in front of the other, following the paths laid out for them.  This was their way, and their parents' way, and their grandparents' way, and most of them never questioned it.  Until the moment he left the sky behind and crashed to Earth, Marcus Kane had never questioned it either.  On the Ark, he had not asked himself what kind of man he wanted to be.  He just lived his life, and made his choices, and in the process of that he became the Marcus Kane who had done the unspeakable things that Marcus Kane had done.  But those days were over.  There was no war anymore.  No fighting over oxygen, no sleeping in shifts to keep lookout for Grounders.  It was peacetime.  It was time to build new lives.  And so he found himself wondering, as they hauled box after box out of Mount Weather, who he would have been if he had grown up on Earth.  Not this Earth, maybe, but old Earth.  If he had come from a less ruthless place, would he have been a less ruthless man?  Was it from outside or inside that our identities were made?  And since he was here now, who did he want to be?    

The answer to that question did not appear to him until Bellamy asked him about the greenhouse.

It was their last day on the mountain, and the team had returned to pack up their makeshift camp.  Bellamy was making one final sweep of the Level 1 storerooms, just to triple-check that nothing crucial had been missed or left behind.  When Kane came looking, he found Bellamy in the agriculture and hydroponics wing adjoining the Level 1 warehouse. 

“What are we going to do with all of this?” asked Bellamy, gesturing at the vast expanse of lush plant life before him.  The people of Mount Weather might have been vicious, but there was no arguing with their technological skill. The agriculture wing stretched out before them, as far as the eye could see, full of tidy rows of planter beds and a dozen or so separate, climate-controlled greenhouses containing fruit trees, vegetables, grain, herbs, even flowers.  "It's a shame to waste it."

"We can keep hauling the produce down to camp," said Kane, "but not the whole operation.  We don't have enough water or power to run it."

"Kind of a hassle to keep sending people on a forty-mile hike whenever they want fruits and vegetables."

"Well, we'll carry back as much as we can," said Kane.  “And then, I suppose, the Chancellor will have to decide what we do with this, and everything else in the bunker that we can’t carry.”

_And the bodies,_ they both thought and didn't say.

"I talked to Wick after he got back from his last run," said Bellamy, "and once Raven gets the all-clear from Medical we're taking a team down to the garages.  She thinks she can get a couple of old cars retrofitted and working again.  And once there's a supply road cleared, we can make the trip from here to camp in an hour instead of days.  So we can send people up a few times a week to tend to the plants, and bring food back." Kane watched Bellamy pluck a handful of ruby-red strawberries and place them carefully in a metal box - presumably a gift for Octavia.

“Good,” said Kane. “That’s a good idea.  About the cars.” 

“Still,” said Bellamy absently, “if Camp Jaha's where we're staying, it seems like we should find a way to grow things closer to home.”

Kane looked at him, feeling something inside himself click into place.

“Do you have another one of those boxes?” he asked Bellamy, and something unreadable in the tone of his voice made Bellamy look up from the strawberries and regard him curiously.

“Over on that shelf,” said Bellamy, puzzled. “Why?”

“I need a minute,” said Kane. “I’ll meet you outside.”

"Everything okay?"

"Everything's fine," said Kane.  "Go back to camp.  I'll be right behind you."

Bellamy nodded and made his way back through the rows of greenery to the door.  He pushed it open and started to leave, but hesitated and turned back to Kane.  Something here wasn't right.  He watched Kane for a moment or two, trying to figure out what the older man was up to.  But Kane simply collected one of the metal boxes from the supply shelf and disappeared with it through the plastic flaps of one of the smaller greenhouses. He was in there for a long time.  Finally Bellamy, who had no interest in being caught spying, gave up and headed back to camp as he'd been instructed, to wait for Kane there.  He found the rest of the crew ready to go, carts loaded.  Kane joined them not long after, and in the bustle and chaos of departure it took Bellamy longer than it should have to realize that Kane was not packed.

He handed the metal box from the greenhouse to Bellamy.  "Give this to Abby for me," he said.

“Why can’t you give it to her yourself?” asked Bellamy, and there was a challenge in his voice. He was going to force Kane to say it out loud.

"Because," said Kane, “I’m not going back.”

Bellamy folded his arms, looked at Kane, and waited.  There was no way he was leaving it at that, and Kane knew it, so he sighed and went on. “There’s a clearing,” Kane said. “About a day’s walk from camp. There’s a creek that runs through it, and some underbrush but no trees. We passed it on our way up here. Do you remember?”

“Yeah,” said Bellamy, “I remember.”

“Mount Weather only needed an indoor hydroponic agriculture lab because they couldn’t go outside,” said Kane. “But if there was a spot with water access and open ground and good soil, midway between here and Mount Weather – close enough to camp to harvest crops easily – and if someone could clear the land and begin transplanting the crops –"

“And if someone was scared as hell to go face Abby Griffin –“

“That’s not fair," said Kane, more sharply than he meant it, but Bellamy was unfazed.

“Look,” said Bellamy. “It’s your life.  You want to do this swords-into-plowshares thing, you want to go dig up dirt in the woods, fine. Do it. Go be a farmer. But come home first. Say goodbye, pack a bag, tell her where you’re going, do it right, and _then_ leave. Don't be a chickenshit.  You can't not say goodbye."

"I did," said Kane.  "Or, I will.  Just make sure she gets that box."

"I'll give her your damn box," said Bellamy, taking it out of his hands and placing it carefully inside his waterproof pack, "but I don't want you to take that as an endorsement of your plan, which I think is pretty stupid."

"Yes," said Kane, "I haven't ruled that out," and he held out his hand to Bellamy.  There was more Bellamy wanted to say, but he didn't.  He just shook Kane's hand, said "Don't stay out here forever," then hoisted his pack and was gone.

Alone in the woods, Kane gathered up the last of his things from camp and walked back to Mount Weather, where he made a makeshift camp of his own in the entrance foyer of the greenhouse.  He found a clipboard and pencil, and paced up and down the endless rows of green, studying the carefully-labeled plants and scribbling lists.  Kane, of course, knew nothing about farming.  The only gardening he had encountered on the Ark was helping his mother tend to the Eden Tree, and that was more ritual than horticulture.  But he was a fast learner, and the scientists at Mount Weather had left impeccable research notes in the agricultural wing’s computer system, which Kane was pleasantly surprised to find was not password-protected – presumably no one felt the need to guard against unauthorized use of a console that only contained data on soil composition and water levels. So he read, and he walked, and he took notes, and three days later he set out from Mount Weather pushing a cart with a tent, a bedroll, a pile of gardening tools, bags of fertilizer and his first experiment – a trailing vine festooned with pink blossoms, twined around a garden stake, which he dug up, roots and all, and carried lovingly down to the clearing.

His mother would have liked this Marcus Kane, he thought.  This Marcus Kane who owned pruning shears, but no gun.  This Marcus Kane, who would be the one to keep Camp Jaha fed.  They had lived on the Ark for so long on protein rations, and down here as wild hunters and gatherers. Kane would plant potatoes and green garlic and corn, and it would grow and grow, until someday it would be a real farm and nobody would ever have to go back inside Mount Weather again. They could close the door. They could start over.

Before he fell asleep that night, he dug a hole in a sunny spot and carefully planted the flowering vine in it, making sure the stake was braced upright to survive rain and wind, and he slept beside it that night, laying out his bedroll so close that he could inhale the sweet scent.  He slept without nightmares, soothed by the soft bubbling murmurs of the stream and the bright, lovely fragrance of flowers.  Oh, he could love it here.  He could do this.  He could make this his life.  Later, before the weather changed, he would build a more permanent shelter. He could do that. He could build himself a house. He could live here, close to the soil, where things were quiet and simple. He could watch things grow. Somebody had to do it. Somebody had to be the first one to put down roots in the ground. And Marcus Kane had been the one who planted the Eden Tree.

She didn’t want his words. She didn’t want his heart. But there were other ways that he could show her that he loved her.

* * *

It did not take Abby to hunt down Bellamy, who was, if not precisely _hiding_ from her, certainly not making quite so much an effort as he should have to find, or be found by, what was likely to be a very angry woman. But Camp Jaha had no secrets from Chancellor Griffin, and she pinned him down in one of the bunk rooms where he had gone to see Jasper and Monty. She did not speak, but grabbed his elbow and steered him outside behind the building. The others looked on in puzzlement, but Bellamy acquiesced quietly and followed her outside.

“Where is he?” she asked as soon as they were alone, carefully keeping her voice neutral and wishing the boy was not scrutinizing her facial expressions quite so closely. It was unsettling.

“He’s . . . not here.”

“Yes, I can see that,” she said shortly. “When is he coming back?”

“I don’t know,” said Bellamy. “I don't think _he_ knows."

“What do you mean?” she said, and there was a little waver of emotion in her voice that she could almost, but not quite, suppress, and was irritated at herself when Bellamy’s furrowed brow indicated that it had not gone unnoticed.

Bellamy explained as best he could – about the greenhouse, and the clearing, and transporting the crops – but because, to be honest, he thought Kane was acting like an idiot, he did not do as credible a job as perhaps he might have done to sell her on the idea, and by the end of his recitation all he had accomplished was convincing Abby that Kane was an idiot too. He pressed the metal box into her hands and turned to leave.

“What's this?” she asked.

“Kane sent it,” he said. “He told me to give it to you.”

“What's in it?”

“I didn’t open it,” he said, “it seemed private,” and there was something in his voice that made her wonder what things Kane had said to Bellamy up there on the mountain that he would never say to her.

“Did he –“ she started to speak, then stopped. _No, Abby. You can’t ask that. You cannot be that woman. “Did he say anything about me, did he give you a message for me, did he tell you when he would be coming back.” You do not grovel to Bellamy Blake._

“Thank you,” she said instead. “You all did good work up there. You should get some rest. Raven and Wick can fill you in tomorrow on where we are with the scouting trip back to the garage. But sleep first.”

“I can take you to him,” said Bellamy, a little hesitantly. “If you wanted. I know where he is. It’s less than a day’s walk. I could take you.”

“That won’t be necessary, thank you,” said Abby. “If he’s decided this is what he wants, that’s fine. It was a matter of time before people began spreading out and establishing more permanent settlements. Though it surprises me that Marcus, of all people, should suddenly find himself overtaken with the urge to become a farmer.”

“Right,” said Bellamy, “fine, but you know why he’s really doing this, don’t you? I mean, you _must_ know.”  Abby found herself suddenly not quite able to look at him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said tightly.

“You asked him to leave,” said Bellamy. “So he left. If that wasn’t what you wanted, you’re going to have to clear that up with him yourself. My job was just to give you that box.  Now I’m done.” And then he closed the door behind him, and was gone.

She sat down on the edge of her bed as the sun set and the world darkened around her, holding the box in her hands. She stared at it for a long time, stroking the metal lid with her fingertips, lost in thought. Finally, after hours had gone by, after the evening babble of the camp outside had softened and mellowed into the quieter hush of night, she switched on the camping lantern beside her bed, took a deep breath, and opened the box.

She let out a gasp.  Inside the box was a mass of delicate pink blossoms, their sweet scent rising up and caressing her. She picked one up, breathed it in. Four slender, angular pink petals extended out in a sort of X shape around a rosy-purple bell-shaped interior. She had never seen anything like it before in her life. The box was full of them. Tentatively, afraid to damage them, she reached her hand inside and savored the soft caress of flower petals against her fingertips, then felt her hand brush something rougher and pulled out a torn piece of paper.  It looked like a label pulled from a plant marker, smudged all over with dirt.  She read the neatly typed words.  “ _Onagraceae._ Blooms late summer – early fall _._ pH Range 5-7 _._ Part shade to full sun _._ Water range normal.”  And there it was. There at the top, in bold, black letters.

“Name of Plant,” it said. “Fuschia ‘Abigail.’”

And underneath it, in Marcus Kane's careful handwriting, were four words:

_May We Meet Again._

               

**TO BE CONTINUED**


	4. "Why Didn't You Tell Me?"

Two months went by before Marcus Kane returned to Camp Jaha.

It was not his idea.  He went grudgingly, dragged by Bellamy and Wick, and only after exacting a guarantee from them that Abby Griffin was not at camp that day.

“People miss you,” said Wick. “Not me, specifically. But, you know, other people. Bellamy misses you.”

“Bellamy does not miss me,” said Kane. “Bellamy is here every week.”

This was true. Where once there had been a bedroll on open ground and a lone fuschia plant on a stake, now there was a rustic but cozy permanent shelter.  Raven, desperately in love with her new electric-powered pickup truck, had been more than happy to haul metal paneling down from Mount Weather to the place she insisted on referring to, over his protests, as Kaneville. Bellamy drove up regularly to carry boxes of produce back to Camp Jaha, and to report on any news (though there had been none) of Clarke. He also brought visitors; half the camp had tagged along to see the place.

Only Abby had not come.

Spring had turned into summer, and Kane had done an excellent job of replanting; the fruit trees and grain he had left at Mount Weather – those were bigger projects – but the vegetables and herbs he had transplanted were happy and thriving, and once a week when Bellamy returned to camp with crates of peppers and tomatoes and garlic and squash, there was always a big public feast. From time to time, Bellamy prodded Kane to stop by so people could thank him. “I’d be happy to drive you there and back,” he said, eliminating the excuse of the walk. But Kane continued to decline.

This time, however, Bellamy had brought reinforcements, and Raven and Wick would not take no for an answer.

“You have to come,” said Raven. “Miller and his dad have been cooking all day, the whole place smells like garlic, it’s incredible.”

“And there’s wine,” said Wick.

“ _So much_ wine,” Raven agreed.

And Bellamy had assured him, tactfully out of earshot of the others, that Abby was gone. Lincoln had begun taking her and Jackson on regular scouting expeditions to learn about the plants the Grounders used for medicinal purposes; they were out near Tondc and not expected back until much later that night.

“Eat some food, drink a glass of wine, let people say thank you, and then I’ll drive you home,” said Bellamy. “You need some human contact.”

And so, reluctantly, Kane had agreed.

If the residents of the Ark – many of whom had known Marcus Kane for years as Thelonious Jaha’s cold-eyed second – were surprised that he had woken up one day and decided to grow eggplant for them, they were tactful, and grateful, enough not to say anything about it when he finally returned. Instead it was all hugs, handshakes, offers to share food made from the things he had grown, and exclamations of delight and thankfulness.

The place had changed. Well, of course it had. He shouldn’t have been surprised. But he was, a little. They had built out from the center of the crashed Ark ship and expanded with a series of makeshift buildings, haphazardly assembled from metal salvage, just like his little shack. It looked cozier, somehow. A little ramshackle, but warmer and more alive than it had when he left.

It was pleasant, being around people. Everyone was beginning new lives. Wounds were healing. They had found the thing they had been searching for, after all. It made Kane feel like his life had meant something. Maybe all the things he thought were sins he would have to pay for the rest of his life were only steps along the way to getting these people home.

He didn’t stay long, though a part of him wanted to – a treasonous part of him that wondered how long he would have to stall to run into Abby Griffin on her way home from Tondc – but he knew it wasn't fair to ambush her like that. So he said his goodbyes and followed Bellamy back to the farthest corner of the camp, where the old pickup truck was parked, plugged into its generator.

Kane was reaching up to open the passenger door when he heard a sound that struck him all the way down to the core – a loud, insistent pounding on Camp Jaha’s front gate.

 _Clarke,_ he thought.  _Clarke._

And without even knowing what he was doing, he took off running, sprinting as fast as he could through the mob of people who were slowing rousing themselves in response to the sound, and arrived at the gate just as it began to open. Two Grounders stood on the other side of it, a man and a woman, unfamiliar, but friendly at least.  No weapons, no war markings, horses grazing calmly a respectful distance away.

“Is it Clarke?” said Kane, trying to catch his breath. “Is she with you? Do you have news about Clarke? Do you know where she is?”

“Yes,” said the woman. “I am Lilith of the Ice Nation, and this is my brother and second, Dakota. Clarke of the Sky People has sent us to you with a message. She is safe and well and will be returning home soon.”

“Oh, thank God,” said Kane, and let out a breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding. “Thank God. And you’re sure?” he pressed the Grounder. “You’ve seen her, you’ve spoken to her?”

“We parted ways not three days ago,” she said. “She traveled with Lexa to visit the Ice Nation. We were her escort back. We brought her as far as Mount Weather. She asked us to leave her there.”

“Clarke’s at Mount Weather?” said Jasper, shouldering up beside Kane, who suddenly realized that a sizable crowd had gathered around the gate to listen.

“We have to go find her,” said Bellamy decisively, but Lilith shook her head.

“She requires solitude,” she said. “She is on a quest.”

“What kind of quest?” pressed Bellamy.

“She is burying the dead,” said Dakota soberly. “She went first to Tondc, where she took part in the funeral rites and remained behind to help rebuild the city. That was where Lexa found her, and took her to visit the Ice Nation. Lexa stayed, but Clarke had unfinished work at Mount Weather. She found the cold room where your people placed the bodies, and she is there now, burying them all according to the practices of your people.”

“You are her mother,” said Lilith, more of a statement than a question, to a point somewhere to the left of Kane’s shoulder, and it was not until that very moment that he realized Abby was standing right beside him.  He looked at her face, shining with tears, and his heart turned over in his chest, and whatever rules he had built up carefully in his mind to give her the space she had asked him for dissolved completely as he reached out and took her hand.  She looked at him, and pressed his hand in both of his.

“Yes,” said Abby. “I’m her mother.”

“I was asked to give you this,” said Lilith, pulling a folded piece of paper from her satchel and handing it to Abby. “Clarke says that she will stay behind at Mount Weather until she has buried all the dead who were killed by her hand, and then she will return to the Sky People. Do not go looking for her. Do not send men back to Mount Weather. Clarke will not be whole again until she has completed this work, and she must do it herself.” She looked around the crowd. “Which of you is Bellamy Blake?”

Bellamy stepped forward, a little unsure. “That’s me,” he said.

“It is to you she asked us to deliver this message,” said Lilith. “She must do this work herself. She said that Bellamy of the Sky People must be told not to follow her. She will come home, but she must complete her quest first.”

“Thank you,” said Kane. “You have done us an extraordinary service, and we are grateful. Will you come inside, and have something to eat?”

Dakota shook his head.

“We are on our way home,” he said. “Our work here is done. We were sent to deliver a letter to the mother of Clarke, and our business with the Sky People is completed.”

They nodded a curt greeting, and turned to go. As they walked back to the place where they had left their horses, Lilith stopped suddenly and turned back.

“We have thanked Clarke ourselves, but we have not thanked you,” she said. “Commander Lexa betrayed the Sky People at Mount Weather, yet Clarke returned to Tondc to bury the _Trigedakru_ dead. And it was not only the Tree People who suffered at the hands of the Mountain Men. All our children are safer because of you. The Ice Nation considers itself friend and ally to the Sky People. Should you need us at any time, Clarke will know how to find us.” Then she vaulted onto her horse, followed by Dakota, and they were gone.

* * *

The crowd dispersed shortly after the Grounders left, buzzing with murmured conversation, and somewhere in the chaos Abby had let go of Kane’s hand and vanished. Kane, following his instincts, went straight to the main supply room, where he found Bellamy stuffing a pack with travel rations and bottled water. He had looked up at the sound of the door opening; seeing it was Kane, and thus assuming no explanation was required, he simply ignored him and kept packing.

“You can’t go after her,” Kane said without preamble. “You heard what the Grounders said.”

“I didn’t go before because I didn’t know where she was,” said Bellamy. “I know where she is now. What she’s doing. I have to go help her.”

“She _specifically_ told them, ‘Tell Bellamy not to come,’” Kane pointed out. “She knows you. She has to do this alone. Maybe you have to let her.”

“She _always_ says that,” Bellamy snapped. “That’s what she says _every time_. She _always_ thinks she needs to do it alone. That’s the _point_. That’s the whole point. She thinks she’s alone but she isn’t.”

“You can’t protect her from this,” said Kane.

“My hand was on that lever too,” said Bellamy, a note of desperation creeping into his voice. “I did it too. I did it with her. Together.”

“I know that,” said Kane, “but it’s different. She carries it in a different way.”

“I can help her,” said Bellamy. “I can carry half the weight.”

“No,” said Kane. “You can’t. You can’t carry any of it. She’s not going to let you. She doesn’t want your help. Let it go.” Bellamy stopped then, and set the pack down, turning to Kane.

“Sometimes I don’t know which of them you’re talking about,” said Bellamy.

A smile tugged at the corner of Kane’s mouth. “Sometimes I don’t either,” he admitted.

“You would go,” said Bellamy, and it wasn’t a question. “If it was Abby. If you were me, and it was Abby up there. Alone with all those dead people. Alone with her guilt, trying to make it right. Wouldn’t you go?”

Kane looked at him for a long time without saying anything. Finally he bent down and picked up a collapsible shovel from the pile of building supplies in the corner and tossed it to Bellamy.

“At least show up with some tools,” he said, “and make yourself useful. And you’d better take Raven’s truck.”

Bellamy took the shovel, folded it and stuffed it in his pack, and then did something he had never done before.

He hugged Kane.

They were both surprised by it – Kane, probably more - and he caught himself wondering if there had ever been a time in Bellamy’s life when he had had any kind of a father. There was an uncharacteristic timidity to his embrace; he had a sister, he was comfortable around women, but he didn’t know how to show emotions with men. Nobody had taught him this.

So Kane hugged him back, firm and reassuring, the way he remembered his own father embracing him. Bellamy and Octavia Blake hadn’t been given the parents they deserved. Kane was cautious about overstepping his bounds with the young people – he was not, after all, anyone’s father, and none of them were children, not after what they had endured, not anymore – but he was keenly aware at that moment that he was the only person in the entire world with access to the secrets of Bellamy’s heart. And there was something healing in that, Kane thought. It was strangely satisfying to be needed.

“Bring her back safe,” was all he said by way of a goodbye. It was unnecessary as a reminder – they both knew, of course, that was exactly what Bellamy would do – but Bellamy knew what it meant. It was a traveler’s benediction, a gesture of permission from the older man to the younger to go and do what he was going to do anyway. But as Bellamy hoisted his pack and left the supply room, they both heard the words Kane didn’t say.

_Bring her back safe, or Abby’s heart will break. And if hers does, so does mine._

* * *

He paced back and forth for a long time outside the door to Abby’s quarters before finally gritting his teeth and knocking. No answer. He waited, listened, tried again, but there was no response. After a few moments, he tried the door. It was unlocked, but the room was empty. Abby wasn’t there.

He sat in the hallway for a little while, listening to the babble outside, and waited to see if she would come back.

It wasn’t that he needed to know what was in the letter. But he badly wanted to know that, whatever Clarke had said, Abby was all right. Things between the two Griffin women had grown so thorny during the battle. Abby’s fury and betrayal when Clarke allowed the missile to fall on Tondc, mixed with her relief at finding her safe in Mount Weather and her soul-crushing grief at the burdens her child had had to carry . . . it was all too much, too much for anyone. Kane understood Clarke by this point remarkably well – well enough to believe with all his heart that her anger had gone, that she had written to her mother not with accusations or coldness but with compassion and affection, written to her because she would have known without being told that Abby would never be able to sleep through the night while her daughter was missing, would be a shell of her old self until she knew that her child was safe. No, he was confident in the letter, and he sent silent thanks to Clarke for sending it. But he wanted to see Abby, just for a minute, to be sure.

It had seemed more respectful, somehow, to try and find a private moment with her.  But after awhile, he gave up waiting for her to come back to her room and decided to venture back out into the camp to search for her.  He went to Medical, to the storage rooms, to the living quarters, and back out by the fires. No Abby. No one had seen her. No one could tell him where she had gone.

“She must be around her somewhere, though,” Monroe had mentioned in passing. “Where would she go?”

She hadn’t meant it, really, as a question, but Kane suddenly knew the answer.

_Where would she go?_

She would go after Clarke.  She would go to Mount Weather.

It was the only thing that made sense. The forest was the only place he hadn’t looked.

Cursing the time he had spent pacing fruitlessly in her hallway, he bolted from the camp and set off up the supply road to Mount Weather, following Bellamy’s tire tracks. There was no time to gather supplies from Camp Jaha; he would grab the pack from his own shelter – he would pass it on the way anyway. He would pack light and walk fast and maybe, if he was lucky, he would catch up to her. Maybe he could bring her back. And if he couldn’t, at least he would hold her hand. He could not let Abby Griffin face that cold room full of dead bodies without him.

Since the supply road had gone in, it was now only about a leisurely four-hour walk to his farm, but he was running as fast as he could, and made it in two. He burst in, panting and out of breath, and hunted around in the corner for his supplies. He found his travel pack, checked to make sure there were still rations in it, then pulled on his coat, zipped it up, threw the pack over his back, and was on his way out the door when he heard a voice.

“Where are you racing off to?”

And there she was.

In the farthest corner of the modest single room that comprised Kane’s new home, on top of his bed, lay Abby. She was curled up in a little ball, almost like a child, and looked impossibly small and fragile. Her head was on his pillow, and she looked as though she might have been sleeping, but sat up as he turned to her.

Kane’s entire body collapsed in relief.

“You’re here,” he said.

She switched on the lantern next to his bed, flooding the room with a dim gold light, and he noticed the letter from Clarke, lying on the bed beside her. He could see that she had been crying.

"Are you all right?" he said.

“I am," she said.  "Yes.  I'm all right.  Where are you going?”

“Nowhere,” he said, unfastening his pack and setting it down, then removing his jacket. “I was looking for you.”

“You thought I went to Mount Weather,” she said.

“I looked everywhere else,” he said. “And I couldn’t find you.”

“You were going to try to stop me?”

“If I could,” he said. “And if not, I thought I would at least go with you."

“Well,” she said, “I thought about it. But then I saw Bellamy Blake tear out of camp in Raven’s truck like a bat out of hell, and I decided I would be redundant.” There was a flicker of a smile at this, and Kane smiled back.

"You have to admit it's endearing,” said Kane. “She told him to stay away and he just said, ‘Screw it.’  He's young, and impulsive, and it makes him brave.  You've got to admire that.”

“Yes,” said Abby softly. “He could have stayed away. He could have waited for her forever.”

“Not forever,” said Kane. “Just until she decided what she wanted.”

Abby looked away from him then, and stared at the floor. It was silent for a long time.

“It’s really nice here,” she said.

“Well, it’s pitch-black outside,” he said, “it looks better in the daylight. But yes. I like it.”

She started to say more, then stopped herself suddenly, as if startled. She rose from the bed and crossed over to the pile of upended wooden crates he had taken to using as haphazard shelving. He followed her with his eyes, unsure what was drawing her in until she reached out a trembling hand and picked up one of the bright pink blossoms scattered across the shelf.

“You found me a flower named Abigail," she said softly.

“The first thing I planted here,” he said. “It smells like home to me now.”

He was painfully aware of how close she was to him. If he stretched out his hand just a little, he could touch her.

But he didn’t.

“I’ve been going over it and over it,” she said, “and there’s something I can’t figure out. At the gate, when the Grounders came. Where were you?”

“Behind the storage sheds,” he said. “By the truck. Bellamy was going to take me home.”

“Ah,” she said. “You wanted to leave before I was supposed to come back.” He didn’t answer. “Bellamy must not have known that Lincoln canceled the field trip because I had a surgery that evening.”

“No,” said Kane, not bothering to deny it, “I don’t think he did.”

“So I was in Medical,” said Abby, thoughtfully, as if trying to put a puzzle together in her mind, “and you were clear on the other side of camp. You were much, much further away than I was. But you were the first one to the gate.”

“Well, I suppose –“

“You _ran_ ,” she said, some kind of strange, charged emotion in her voice. “You ran. You thought it was Clarke.”

“Yes,” he said, still not sure what she was getting at.

“And when they said Clarke was coming home,” she said, “I saw the look on your face.”

“I was relieved,” he said. “I was glad she was safe.”

Abby shook her head.

“Everyone was glad she was safe,” she said. “But not everyone looked the way you did.” Her voice cracked a little, and she took his hand. “The night we came home from Mount Weather,” she said, “the night you kissed me – ” Kane couldn’t look at her. “I said something awful to you.”

“It’s forgotten,” said Kane. “That was months ago. You were angry, you were scared, and I crossed a line. I was wrong.”

“No,” she said, “you weren’t. I was. I was awful. I knew it was spiteful, treating you like you were just some guy trying to get into my bed. I _meant_ to be a little spiteful. I didn’t realize it was the cruelest thing I could possibly have said.”

And she stepped in close to him, wrapping her arms around his back and burying her face in his chest, and he exhaled deeply, feeling the weight of the past three months slip off his shoulders as he held her in his arms.

“I tried to forget,” she said. “I wanted to. It was all too much, just then, and I thought it would be easier to figure everything out without you. But you weren’t supposed to stay away so long.” Her arms tightened around him. “I knew you felt . . . something . . . that night, when you kissed me. And when you sent me the flowers, I thought it meant goodbye. I thought it meant you wanted to forget too. But I didn’t know – until tonight, until I saw your face, when the Grounders told us that Clarke was safe – I didn’t know how you felt. About Clarke, and . . .” she stopped. “And about me.” She pulled away from him then, just a little, just enough to look up at him.

“Marcus,” she said softly, laying her hand against his cheek and drawing his head down close to hers. “Why didn’t you tell me?” And there was no use pretending he didn’t know exactly what she meant.

“I didn’t know,” he said. “Not until Mount Weather. Not until I thought I was about to lose you.”

“You held my hand the whole way back,” she said. “You stayed with me until I was safe.”

“You would have done the same for me,” he said, and she nodded.

“In a heartbeat,” she said. “That’s why I was scared. That’s why I sent you away. When you said what you said . . .” She stopped, overcome with emotion. “You told me I was afraid to want anything,” she went on, “because everything I’d ever loved had been taken away.”

“I did,” said Kane. “I did say that.”

“You were right,” she said. “You were right about everything.” And then his heart stopped beating as she bent his head to hers, and kissed him.

Every cell of Marcus Kane’s body came alive at the taste of her soft mouth, hungry and certain, on hers. She kissed him with her whole self, and her kiss told him everything he needed to know. It said, _I am no longer afraid._ It said, _I am opening myself up to you._ It said, _Hold nothing back, and take what you will._

And he did.

His arms wrapped around her, pulling her tightly. One hand became tangled in her hair, the other fell to her waist. Her hands were on his back, and one of them drifted downward, where a soft fingertip brushed against a tiny window of bare skin where his shirt had come untucked when he pulled off his jacket. Her hand on the bare skin of his back sent a jolt through him. Emboldened a little, he moved his mouth from the warm wetness of hers and pressed hungry kisses into her neck. It was accelerating, the waves of heat passing between them. They had ceased merely kissing and were moving _towards_ something, carried along as if pulled by some immutable cosmic force. His whole body was crying out to become one with hers. As his mouth touched her skin, she murmured his name, voice soft, languid, and he couldn’t stop himself from wondering if she would say it like that with him inside her, and the thought of that – of her body beneath his, as they moved together, as she cried out for him – unstitched him entirely.

“Abby,” he said, and tried to say more but couldn’t, it was impossible to tear his mouth away from the salty tang of her skin for long enough to get a full sentence out. But she heard the unspoken words and nodded.

“Yes,” she said urgently. “Please, Marcus. _Please_.”

Her shirt was off and his face buried in her breasts before he even realized he had done it. Her breasts tasted like salt and soil, and as his tongue ran long, smooth lines up and down the space between them, he thought unaccountably of nymphs and dryads, the beautiful women of the woodlands he had learned about in stories as a child. She sighed with pleasure, her hands tangled in his hair, pressing him closer to her. She tasted like forest. He let his mouth roam where it would for a long, long time, before his urgent yearning to taste more of her – to feel her nipples in his mouth – led him to slip his hands around her bare back to unhook the clasp of her bra.

And then his fingers brushed the telltale ridges of scar tissue, and he snatched his hand away, rapidly, violently, as though the touch of her skin had burned him, and recoiled so entirely that Abby nearly lost her balance.

Scars.

On her back.

Where he had flogged her.

He couldn’t pull away from her fast enough, bolting to the other side of the room.

“Marcus,” she whispered softly, with surpassing tenderness in her voice.

“I did that to you,” he said, his voice shaking, as he pressed his back against the wall as far away from her as the tiny room would let him get. “I did that to you. I hurt you.”

She did not disagree. She did not dismiss it. She understood what he meant.

“That’s over now,” was all she said, and she held out her hand to him. “That was so long ago.”

“When we were inside Mount Weather,” he said, shaking, “when I watched them – “

“Don’t, Marcus. It’s all right.”

“I would have done anything to stop it.”

“I know,” she said softly. “I saw you. I was looking at you.”

“I wanted to kill them,” he said. “For hurting you. There was a part of me –“ And he stopped himself, unable to go on.

“There was a part of you that wasn’t sorry to see them all die,” she finished for him, nodding. “I know. I don’t think you were the only one.”

“I wasn’t thinking about the others,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking about the hostages, about the captured Grounders, about how many of our own people we lost. All I could think was that you were in pain, and I couldn’t stop it. But what right did I have, when the worst scars on your body were from me?”

“You’re more afraid of my pain than your own,” she said, wonder in her voice.  " _That's_ why you left.  _That's_ the real reason."

“Abby –“

“I love you, too,” she said, and it silenced him completely. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. She rose from the ground then and came to stand before him. Without taking her eyes away from his, she began, very slowly, to remove the rest of her clothes, until she stood before him completely naked. The patchwork of scars and bruises across her body told the story of her life in reverse, from yesterday’s battle to the birth of Clarke to her rough-and-tumble childhood. Every mark was a piece of what made Abigail Griffin who she was. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Then she turned around, and the row of striped scars on her back – the ones he had placed there himself – made a wave of nausea rise up in the pit of his stomach.

“Abby –“

“Touch me,” she said over her shoulder. “The pain is gone. It’s just skin. There’s nothing left there to hurt you.” He stepped closer to her and reached out a timid hand towards her back, brushing the scars with his fingertips.

She did not shudder, except a little, with pleasure. She did not pull away. He ran his hands up and down her back, feeling the softness of the skin, tracing the rough raised lines with his fingertip.

“Kiss me there,” she said in a quiet voice, and he did, pressing first his mouth and then his tongue against her bare flesh. She gave a soft sigh of pleasure, almost a purr.

“How can you bear it?” he said in wonder. “How can you stand to let me touch you? How can you feel these scars every day and not hate me?”

“We’re not those people anymore, Marcus,” she said. “It’s in the past. And besides,” she added, a hint of a smile in her voice, “it’s how I know you belong to me. I wear you on my skin.” And she turned to him, then, her eyes warm with yearning, and she pulled the shirt off over his head, pressing her mouth to his chest. He swallowed hard, tried to speak, but couldn’t. He closed his eyes, feeling his breath begin to falter and grow ragged, felt himself swell and harden as her lips brushed his nipples. And she must have felt it too, he realized, as her hands slid down his chest and began to undo his belt.

Nothing in Marcus Kane’s life had prepared him for the way it would feel when Abby’s hand found his hardness and began, ever so slowly, to stroke him, while her hot mouth exhaled fierce kisses onto his chest. He rose and fell, moving against her hand. She slipped her other arm around the small of his back, stepped in closer, melted into him. He breathed deeply, smelling her hair. Salt and forest. Her hand began to stroke harder, and he felt his knees begin to give way. He would collapse at her feet if she finished him like this. The pleasure was too much.

“I love you,” he said, raggedly, between harsh panting breaths. “I didn’t say it before.”

“You didn’t have to,” she said. “I knew. That’s why I'm here.  I came here to make you say it.” She pulled her hand away then, and kissed him full on the mouth, a long slow kiss full of promises, before returning to lie on his bed, holding out her hand to him. She lay, waiting patiently, while he fumbled with pants and belt and boots until he was as naked as she was. He sank down beside her, feeling her whole body pressed against his, both hard and soft, both determined and yielding, and his hands found the wetness between her thighs. She buried her mouth in his shoulder, and moaned his name as he caressed her. He slipped a finger inside, then another. Her whole body jolted as if electricity had surged through her, and he felt her teeth dig into his skin.

He winced and pulled away, just for a moment, his hand pausing inside her, and she laughed.

“I didn’t draw blood,” she said wryly, “that’s a good sign. Did I hurt you?”

“Startled me a little,” he said, “that’s all.”

“Maybe it’s time you had a scar or two from me to even the score,” she said.

He leaned down and brushed a loose lock of her hair out of her eyes.

“What makes you think I don’t already?” he said, and if there was anything left inside Abby Griffin attempting to resist him, that was when it surrendered. The door inside her opened wide, all the way, and there was her heart, whole and alive and _his_ , and the dark fears she had locked inside with it dissolved in the air. She kissed him over and over and over, kissed him until neither of them could breathe, and before he had even realized what was happening she had reached down, taken him in her hands and guided him inside of her. He inhaled sharply as the warm wetness enfolded him and he sank into her, tentatively at first, then more boldly.

“More,” she whispered, and he let her pull him in deeper and deeper. It was intoxicating, being inside her. He felt himself soaring near climax almost immediately, and had to force himself to slow down, to draw it out, to let her catch up. He slipped his hand down between their surging bodies and ran a gentle finger through the soft wet folds as he thrust into her. Being pleasured from two different directions was almost too much for her, and she writhed beneath him like a wild animal.

“Abby,” he breathed into her ear, over and over, as she cried out, and the distance between himself and Camp Jaha that had seemed so weighted with sadness before became a gift, because they were entirely alone. There was no need for caution and quiet. He wanted to hear her cry out at the top of her lungs. He wanted to rouse her to pleasure so deep that it swallowed her whole. He wanted her to let go.

He held out as long as he could, but the climax that began building within him from the moment his mouth touched her breasts finally overtook him. He pulsed and surged inside her, mouth buried in her throat, clutching her body like a drowning man, and when he finally came, he collapsed on top of her from the force of it, sated and sweating and delirious with contentment. He lay there for a few moments as she ran her fingers through his hair with an almost maternal tenderness.

“Marcus,” she said softly, “that was –“

“Not over,” he finished for her, as his hand slipped down between her thighs again. “Your turn.”

“Marcus . . .” she began, but he never found out what she wanted to tell him, because his fingers found the right spot just then, and she lost herself. He did not kiss her, as she came again and again beneath his hand. He watched her instead. The look of fierce concentration as she writhed to capture more of him, then the acceleration of her breath, her soft cries, then climax, then the collapse into heavy, sleepy softness after he finally pulled away.

“Thank you,” said Abby softly after a few moments of silence, and he looked away, a little embarrassed, which made her laugh. “No,” she said, “not for _that_ – although, thank you for that too – but that wasn’t what I meant.”

“Then tell me what you meant.”

“Everything you did,” she said. “Planting things, and growing things. This whole new way of life for us. This whole new side of you. It was because you didn’t want anyone but you to have to go back to Mount Weather.”

“I didn’t want _you_ to have to go back to Mount Weather,” he said. “But yes.”

“You made everything different,” she said. “Camp Jaha was just a shelter before. Now it feels like –“

“A home,” he said. But she shook her head.

“No,” she said. “Not for me. Not without you.”

He pressed a kiss against her forehead and smoothed her hair.

“All your life,” he said, “all you’ve done is tend to everyone else. Doctor, mother, council member, Chancellor. You’re the one who makes sure everyone else is safe, and well, and cared for, and holding onto whatever humanity we have left. You’re the one keeping everything going.” He stroked her cheek with infinite gentleness. “I just wanted to be the one person who gave _you_ what you want.”

“So you left,” she said. “Because I told you to.”

“Yes.”

“And will you go with me,” she asked, “if I ask you to come home?”

“I’ll go anywhere,” he said. “I’ll do anything. I just want to make you happy.”

“Happy,” she said, wonder in her voice. “I wasn’t sure I’d ever find that again.” She curled up into his body and nestled in, closing her eyes. “Thank you.”

And they slept, sound and sweet, untroubled by wakefulness or bad dreams, as the warm night air floated in through the open windows carrying the delicate fragrance of the flowers that bore Abigail’s name.

 

**THE END**

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [PODFIC: The Scars That Show](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7272457) by [ChancellorGriffin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChancellorGriffin/pseuds/ChancellorGriffin)




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